At CES 2019, LITE-ON Storage, an established leader in the rapidly expanding solid-state drive (SSD) industry, will preview its first storage device series built around emerging Quad-Level Cell (QLC) technology.

The new QLC SATA SSD series is expected to deliver dramatically higher levels of speed, performance and cost effectiveness than current NAND technology and compete with many hard disk drive (HDD) storage offerings. Release of QLC SSD is slated for the second half of 2019.

With the exponential growth of data, information technology (IT) leaders are under pressure to reduce infrastructure costs and increase operational efficiency. Storage accounts for a large portion of overall IT funding. HDD can become a bottleneck in terms of speed, performance, and reliability.

“Many data centers struggle with reliability problems, high power consumption, excessive noise and slow read-write speeds associated with hard disk drives (HDDs),” said Darlo Perez, Managing Director, Americas region at LITE-ON Storage. “With QLC, we will not only improve our lineup of powerful SSDs, we will be able to offer companies a clear and sensible migration path toward high-performing SSDs – with all of the advantages inherent in them.”

QLC flash, which stores four bits per cell, is expected to deliver an extra 33 percent in storage density over current TLC flash with three bits per cell of storage.

“We’ve seen the SSD industry making noise about moving to QLC to once-and-for-all challenge HDDs in the data center, so it makes sense for LITE-ON to go in this direction,” said Gregory Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights. “SSDs take up less space, do not fail as often because they have no moving parts and use less power than HDDs. While QLC SSDs don’t eliminate the cost-per-gigabyte advantages of hard drives, their latency response time, overall performance and power savings combine to provide a compelling total cost of ownership (TCO) compared to HDDs in a variety of workloads.”

LITE-ON also plans to showcase several of its other upcoming SSDs for client, enterprise and industrial solutions during CES 2019.